According to an article for USA Today, "Nicola Thorp was told in December 2015 that her shoes were unacceptable for a temporary assignment in London with finance firm PwC. Her employment agency, Portico, had a dress code [that read in part]:
Female workers must wear non-opaque tights, have hair with “no visible roots,” wear “regularly re-applied” makeup — and appear in shoes with a heel between 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters) high.
For Thorp, that was a step too far. She started an online petition, calling formal workplace dress codes “outdated and sexist.” It has gathered more than 150,000 signatures, making it eligible for a debate in Parliament. Thorp said, “twenty years ago, women weren’t allowed to wear trousers in the same role that I’m doing now, and it’s only because some women spoke up about that and said, ‘We feel like we have a right to wear trousers,’ that that’s changed.”
Monday’s debate is non-binding, but the political pressure for companies to scrap mandatory high heels is building. British law forbids companies from discriminating against women, but Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee said in a report sparked by Thorp’s experience that “discriminatory dress codes” remain commonplace.The lawmakers said they heard from hundreds of women “who told us about the pain and long-term damage caused by wearing high heels for long periods in the workplace, as well as from women who had been required to dye their hair blonde, to wear revealing outfits and to constantly reapply makeup.”
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For me personally, many years ago in 2000, I got a job working for a store akin to a Wal-mart where we sold just about everything aside from food. After working there for just over 2 months, we got a memo about the updated uniform requirements which we just assumed would be tuck in your shirts, make sure your uniform looks tidy and so on. And it was up until the last line for the new women's dress code that now stated that female staff were to begin wearing heels to work. HEELS!
The sh*t definitely hit the fan on that one. All the floor staff were female save for 4 male employees who worked in menswear. The rest of the male staff worked in stocking/receiving/inventory. All of us women worked a counter or a register where we were standing for sometimes 8 hours straight on our feet. We weren't allowed to leave our registers or counters unless it was our lunch break, we were helping a customer, or we needed a restroom break. You couldn't even see our legs because they were totally covered by a booth. But that's not even half the point...why on earth would we actually need to wear high heels? We were already required to wear a plain no logo white, brown, or black colored shoes with our uniform which was slacks and a company t-shirt. Heels would not improve work performance or indicate to customers that we worked there like a company t-shirt.
The memo spread through the staff like wildfire. Half the female staff threatened to quit the same day. Within hours of this uproar, there was one apology made, and that part of the dress code was abolished and not another word spoken about it by upper management who were all male and had apparently never been forced to stand for 8 hours in a small booth in a pair of 3 inch heels all day five days a week.
An employee should not have to suffer back, knee, and foot pain just because she's a woman and a woman "can" wear heels. I am well aware that if you want to work some place, and there is a dress code, an employer has the right to require you to wear it and you the choice of whether you want to work there or not, but just because someone can require it, doesn't mean they should especially when it puts employees at risk. We weren't models on a Paris Runway nor did anyone even see our feet, nor was it practical or safe for our health to do so for that long a time that we had to stand. Because we who would be forced to wear heels spoke up and pointed out, just as Thorp suggested, how wrong and unhealthy this was, it was done away with rather than allowed to become part of the work attire. I'm happy to report that at no other job since, even working in business offices, have I ever been told via a dress code or other means, that I was "required" to wear heels. Implied, sure, required, no.
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